Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video

Over the last couple of weeks we have had some great discussions with customers who reached out and as a part of our conversations we received very positive feedback on the direction we are taking. Thank you for all your support. We want to use this blog post to answer the questions that customers asked us as many of you may have some of the same questions too, especially, if you were using or evaluating Office 365 Video.

We also wanted to do this in a very Stream(y) manner - with a video. Mark Kashman (Product Marketing Manager for Office & SharePoint) and I recorded this short video to answer all your questions and talk to how we see both Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video today and how they evolve in the future.

We hope we were able to answer all your pressing questions. If you still have more questions feel free to reach out on our forum or comments below . Happy Streaming!

Q&A

How is Microsoft Stream different from Office 365 Video?

The popularity of Office 365 Video validates our belief that video is increasingly important for organizations big and small. With Microsoft Stream our goal is to enable businesses and teams to be able to sign up for a video solution with ease. As we do this we are also enabling new capabilities. These capabilities during Preview are designed for customers who are not Office 365 users.

During preview, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will co-exist. We will integrate Microsoft Stream into Office 365 to offer one video solution for businesses – whether they use Office 365 or not.

What does Stream mean for Office 365 customers using Office 365 Video? As an Office 365 subscriber should I use Microsoft Stream or Office 365 Video?

There is no change for customers using Office 365 Video during the Microsoft Stream preview.

Microsoft Stream is currently in Preview but Office 365 Video is a Generally Available (GA) product.

For the immediate term nothing changes with O365 Video. Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video are two distinct services at this time

If you have O365 E/A/G license use O365 Video.

If you don't have O365 E/A/G license, now you can use Microsoft Stream Preview.

Over time, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will converge into a single solution.

Will Microsoft Stream replace Office 365 Video? If so, when? What happens to my content? What will happen to the IT management capabilities?

Yes, longer term, Microsoft Stream will be the defacto video solution from Microsoft for businesses.

Office 365 video and Microsoft Stream both share a common goal of unlocking the potential of videos to help businesses. During preview, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will co-exist as two distinct offerings.

At the time when all necessary features and integrations with Office 365 (like integrations with Delve, SharePoint Home, Enterprise Search, Governance and compliance) are available with Microsoft Stream then we will make Microsoft Stream the one video solution for business - whether they use O365 or not. This will mean that over the course of time O365 Video merges into Stream. At that time, any content already in Office 365 will not be impacted and continue to work. Additionally, existing embedded videos and apps built on APIs are also expected to continue to work.

Once convergence is complete, Office 365 Video customers will also be able to enjoy all the capabilities and experiences in Microsoft Stream and vice-versa.

Why did you start with something brand new instead of iterating on, extending, and improving O365 Video?

Office 365 Video is enjoying a ton of success and we wanted to expand the reach of video to non-Office subscribers too and offer a 5-second sign up experience. As a result, we created Microsoft Stream as a separate product. We wanted to provide a solution that would work for business users of all kinds – whether or not they are Office 365 customers.

What's going to happen to the apps and custom developments I've created on top of the Office 365 Video REST APIs?

We are working to address the path the APIs will take. No matter the final result, we intend to keep the existing APIs up and running for a long enough time to give customer's the time they need to migrate any new version of our APIs. Please stay tuned for more details as we get closer to the timeline.

Does this mean that there will be no new features and enhancements to O365 Video?

No. Our goal is to keep existing customers happy. Office 365 Video will still get new features and enhancements and we will pick what we do based on needs and feedback from customers. We are actively doing development on the top voted features on our User Voice.

Here are some examples:

We recently pushed out an enhancement to the embed dialog when getting embed codes.

We are in the process of rolling out People meta-data

We are updating our video profile to include a lower bandwidth stream of a video to help customers that have locations with lower bandwidth.

O365 Video now works with SharePoint Home to show you the video channels you frequent and what changes have been made in them.

O365 Video is included in the O365 Moodle plugins so you can easily upload and play videos from O365 Video inside of Moodle lessons.

We are also working with several SDN / eCDN providers for caching within the internet. These partners include Ramp's OmniCache, Hive Streaming, and Kollective.

I just trained my people on Office 365 Video? Will I have to retrain?

Microsoft Stream is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. The features and capabilities will be very similar to O365 Video and most of permissions, governance available with Office 365 Video will be available in Microsoft Stream in the future. To double click, there are two different kinds of training associated with the solution:

Training content gurus and admins/managers on how to create content and manage it using permissions and channels

Training users to use the portal to consume content

Any training for the content gurus, still applies whether you use Microsoft Stream or Office 365 Video as the constructs will be similar. For the second one, the concepts are similar and UI may be a little different but we don’t anticipate needing any significant investments around re-training.